DSAG’s SolMan day: ALM on the rise, security issues one of several drivers
The German SAP user group, DSAG, met at the beginning of the year for an SAP Solution Manager-themed day in Würzburg. At the center of the event: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), which is quickly becoming the most important new buzzword wherever SAP Solution Manager and Focused Solutions are concerned. This is also in line with the latest developments in the SAP product portfolio.
ALM ensures that changes and additions to a system landscape can be outlined, planned, designed and implemented as effectively as possible. This means that ALM covers the entire planning and implementation process of software solutions in ERP systems. However, it isn’t clear to everyone yet how important this area is. Its advantages, such as transparent and readily available documentation and correspondingly easier project management, are not yet on the forefront to the extent that they could be.
Concerning ALM, one of the greatest challenges for any company’s own IT is to find a way through the thicket of related topics. For many companies, the changes implied by the rise of the cloud have been difficult to assess. Although there is a degree of awareness that anyone will have to move and be open to innovations, most of the participants in the ALM working group within DSAG are not actually in the cloud yet.
Another aspect of the situation is that SAP’s product portfolio was adapted to the new circumstances only relatively recently. The announcement that Solution Manager will continue to run in full until 2027 is in part a reaction to the fact that the upcoming deadline for migrating to S/4HANA by 2025 was never very popular.
However, the work is ongoing. One of the reasons is that ALM still promises great advantages. At the DSAG’s Solution Manager day, companies reported on the implementation of various ALM solutions, in particular the Focused Solutions Suite. For example, the Otto Group, which introduced SAP Focused Insights.
Their experience coincides with that of blueworks in that users are at first somewhat strained to figure out how to start using the new solution, that it is important to concentrate on the essentials when designing the dashboard, and to start with just one or two dashboard categories.
But once this works, Focused Insight is actually a hit. Otto’s internal customers are enthusiastic about the new solution, find it fun to experiment with, and find that proofs of concept can be implemented quickly. Further advantages are that the installation and configuration can be done quickly, loading times are short, and that tests in the productive system are no additional risk.
At the time of the DSAG day in Würzburg, Solution Manager 7.2 was in use by more than 10,570 customers worldwide. They include giants such as Boeing, Coca Cola, Zurich Assurance, but also Bosch, Audi and many others. Awareness of system security and stability is also increasing steadily.
This is reflected also in the use of the corresponding applications for SAP Security and the higher demands in this field. In the cloud, it is the SAP Trust Center, while on-prem it is Configuration Validation, System Recommendations, Early Watch Alert, the Security Optimization Service, and the alerts in the support portal.
However, customers are also demanding innovations, such as the bundling and standardized application of the various information sources on security patches. There is also a need for a central, cross-system security dashboard for all SAP products both in the cloud and for on-prem systems.
